Thursday, 24 February 2011

Another warm sunny day in Exeter and the frogs were joined in their spawning by some of the newts, two of which were very close to the surface. I also saw a dragonfly larva close to the surface yesterday - hopefully it wasn't considering emerging in February. Apologies if you're already getting sick of frog photos, but I can't get enough of them at the moment!

Saturday, 19 February 2011

The larger of our two ponds has been wriggling for the last few hours - literally wriggling due to all the frogs. I had been trying to count the number of new clumps of spawn each day, but with over 30 frogs in the pond today I've had to give up. As usual when I tried to get close most of the frogs dived under the surface, but this shot, rather blurred and taken at a distance should give you an idea of what it was like:The croaking was so loud it could be heard in the kitchen (the pond is at the bottom of the garden, several metres away). I took some videos with my camera to record the sound of croaking, but the images are terribly poor so I switched to a video camera after lunch. Hopefully I'll figure out how to edit a bit of the video and post it here in a few days.

Friday, 18 February 2011

The clumps of frog spawn in the ponds are growing rapidly in number (totalling over 20 so far) and today I finally managed to sneak a look at the frogs. For some reason frogs at Frog End are incredibly shy and once I'd got closer than 2 metres from the pond they dived under the surface to hide amongst the plants and leaves.Although there are plenty of crocus and snowdrops flowering in other gardens near here this primula is the only Spring flower to have come out in our garden so far:

Saturday, 12 February 2011

After several months of only the usual birds we finally have some new life in the garden - frog spawn. It's a warm sunny day here in Exeter and the frogs have obviously decided that it's Spring - exactly two weeks earlier than last year. Hopefully they're right.